It was a heckuva busy pandemic for us here at Brownrice and we thought you might be interested in some of the things that we’ve been doing behind the scenes to ensure that your web sites, webcams, email, and servers are serving up the things they serve quickly, securely, and reliably!
Data Center Upgrades
During the pandemic we grew at unprecedented speeds and as a result we upgraded nearly all of our infrastructure to keep up with our growth. We upgraded our generators, our battery systems, our solar array, our routers and switches, much of our electrical systems, our monitoring and alerting systems, our upstream internet pipes and our redundancy.
Most the time these upgrades went off without a hitch, but not always, as we did encounter a few bumps and bruises in the midst of all of that. However, we’re proud to say that over the last year these upgrades have paid of fantastically and our speeds and uptime have been nearly flawless. Hopefully you’ve noticed as well ;) And we now have a ton of capacity for growth.
Dashboard MFA released!
One of the things that brings us a lot of pride, and allows us to compete with the massive-scale hosters, is that we write much of our software ourselves. Among myriad advantages with this approach is that it allows us to tailor our offerings to our clients; and only build in the things that our clients want and use. It also saves us from paying massive software license fees (ugh, cPanel!) like nearly every other hoster does, who then pass those costs on to their clients. Along those lines we’ve recently released Multi Factor Authentication (MFA) for our Dashboard, which allows you to further secure the data you host with us. If you want to learn more, or set it up, head on over to this FAQ.
More Sun Powered Servers
We upgraded our solar array from a 20kW array to a 50kW array early in 2022 and so far we couldn’t be more pleased. Being a data center business we use a LOT of electricity, but since the solar upgrade our array is producing over 50% of the electricity that our data center consumes. You can see the live solar production on our website, right here. And we’re going to continue reinvesting our profits into more solar production and hope to be fully solar powered by 2026. Yep, no offsets, no credits, just pure solar power (with generator and grid backup power of course!)
And so many 5-Star reviews!
As always the thing that we most appreciate is making you, our customers, happy. And so far our reviews have been outstanding. Thank you! It’s really why we do it. Being a small (hosting) fish in a massive pond, delivering personalized and high quality services and support to you, using the data center, network, and software that we’ve largely built ourselves to do so, continues to give us hope that mass-scale business and mass-scale support is not what we all have to suffer through.
Here’s to a great 2023!
Thank you for your business!
The Brownrice Staff
https://www.brownrice.com
support@brownrice.com
(575) 758-4175
https://twitter.com/brownriceint
